I posted about a week ago that I had found a junction box with five wires going to it behind the bathtub in the second floor bathroom I am remodeling. I was able to completely remove three of the wires and still had two that were providing power all the way to the other end of the house.
One wire provided power to the kitchen lights on the first floor. I was able to remove a couple of floor planks at the point just above the stairs and pull that wire through and wound up with a long enough wire to route it through the wall by the stairs all the way to the basement and install a new junction box there that is not hidden.
The other wire provides power to a couple of outlets in the kitchen and the flood light to the back yard. I found where it runs down into the first floor wall but it does not come out into the basement so I had no idea how it was routed to the other side of the house. There was another wire there too that was not hooked up to the old junction box that I had no way of knowing what it was for.
I wound up opening a hole in the drywall near the ceiling on the first floor to see where the wire went. I found another junction box there and all it did was hook up the wire I was tracing to the other wire that went back up under the bathtub and into the wall behind the bathtub.
I removed the new junction box and pulled the wire all the way back to behind the bathtub and wound up with a long enough wire to run through the wall into the next room where I can hook it up to an outlet there that is on it's own circuit.
I was not able to remove all of the old wire but at least there are no more hidden junction boxes on those circuits and I was able to break up a larger circuit into two separate circuits.
If I ever get the time to re-do the kitchen ceiling I can get rid of pretty much all of the old wire left in the house. But it will have to do for now.
David